Brie Larson’s gone from being held captive in a little room to getting stuck in a very big one with bullets flying all around it.

Guess she likes dangerous, enclosed spaces?

“Nooo, I don’t,” the “Room” Oscar-winner and co-star of the new shoot-’em-up “Free Fire” says with a nervous laugh. “I also really liked making ‘Kong [Skull Island],’ where I got to be in, like, expansive, limitless space. So I’m trying to balance it out.”

Ben Wheatley’s bloody, gunfight-in-a-1970s-warehouse exercise “Free Fire” isn’t the most balanced of movies, castingwise. The ensemble features Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley, Sam Riley, Jack Reynor, a bunch of other foulmouthed, trigger-happy guys … and Larson. The only other female voice we hear is a disembodied one over a telephone.

That was just fine with Larson, though, who plays a mysterious American businesswoman, Justine, brokering a gun deal between Irish Republican Army terrorists and a shady South African supplier.

“There’s a reason why I was the only woman in this movie; it was part of the metaphor,” the 27-year-old actress says. “I would love to do more films with more women always, because that’s my favorite thing. But this, from the personal side, all the guys were gentlemen. They were all engaged or married or have kids, and so I was just like everybody’s little sister. It was a dream experience, really.”

Well, except for the shoes. Shot in generally chronological order at a warehouse in Brighton, England, for six weeks, the “Free Fire” production gave each actor one set of ’70s fashions that got gradually torn up — and bloodier — as the firefight wore on. Larson chose to wear high-heeled boots over Justine’s designer jeans, and quickly regretted it.

“I felt like my character didn’t know she was going to be climbing out of a warehouse, fighting for her life,” she reveals. “So I decided to go with clothes that were not really reasonable, like clothes that she thought looked good, but she’s not prepared to run for her life. So, really high heels, which I don’t usually wear.

“I was so excited on the first day of filming that I made this cool character choice. Then after one day of standing, my feet were just cramping up in so much pain. I was like, ‘Ben, help, I need to be not in these heels anymore.’ He said, ‘Ah, give it a week. Then you’re gonna be shot and you’re gonna be crawling on the floor.’ Which was true. A week later I was crawling on the floor for a month, and all I wanted was to be standing again.”

Another new thing for Larson was weapons training. She found that interesting, but it also taught her that she doesn’t enjoy being around guns. So, you’d wonder, what attracted her to Wheatley’s most ballistic movie yet, following such violent works as “Kill List,” “Sightseers” and “High-Rise”?

“A couple of things,” she explains. “One was the idea of this very mysterious and enigmatic character. You don’t really know what her intentions are, what’s the truth or what’s not the truth with her, what’s manipulative and what’s not, in a very subtle, standoffish way.

“The other part is this larger context of violence and just the question of, what’s the point? Whenever I watch the movie, I’m 40 minutes into it and they’re all still shooting each other and I’m like, ‘Why is this still happening?’ Just the metaphor itself of a bunch of people fighting till the end for something that happened the day before — that most of them weren’t even there for — is such a perfect metaphor of life.”

Larson, who’s always on the lookout for chances to re-imagine archetypes like she does the femme fatale in “Free Fire,” has recently suggested that she hopes to do something different with the female superhero, too, when she plays Captain Marvel in the upcoming “Avengers: Infinity War” and her following standalone movie.

In the meantime, she thinks “Free Fire” has a lot to offer audiences on whichever level they want to take it.

“There are many angles,” she says. “You can look at what’s on the surface or you can look at it’s more philosophical, metaphorical side. Either way, it’s entertaining to watch no matter what angle you want to look at it from.”

Bob Straus has been covering film at the L.A. Daily News since 1989. He wouldn't say the movies have gotten worse in that time, but they do keep getting harder to love. Fortunately, he still loves them.

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